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Quotes About Contemporaries

I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were.
~ Howard Jacobson
It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.
~ Jorge Luís Borges
Being scared is really a good thing. It's being scared of being scared that's bad. Being scared of walking through your fear, going to a place of true creativity - that's what an artist is, that's what he does. If you do that, then being inspired by your contemporaries or people from the past is really great.
~ Lawrence Bender
Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.
~ Joseph J. Ellis
As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only "His Excellency.
~ Joseph J. Ellis
The products of art and science owe their existence not merely to the effort of the great geniuses that created them, but also to the unnamed drudgery of their contemporaries. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
~ WALTER BENJAMIN
I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.
~ Danny Boyle
the conclusion that Jesus said `Abba' to God for precisely the same reason that (most of) his contemporaries refrained from its use in prayer - viz., because it expressed his attitude to God as Father, his experience of God as one of unusual intimacy.60
~ James D.G. Dunn
Jesu's walls of distortion are uplifting in comparison to those of its doom-driven contemporaries. The band's 2009 album 'Infinity' has its bleak moments, but that album's single 49-minute song resolves into something inspirational and grandiose by the time it's over.
~ Anthony Fantano
The study of women in the American Revolution, based on the extant writings of contemporaries, is beset with dangers. First, because only a fraction of women in those times were literate, we are working with a biased sample. Less than half of the women who left wills could sign their names, and those who left wills came from the more prosperous and presumably more educated portion of the female population
~ Ray Raphael
The other actresses, who are called my contemporaries, they started with a megastar. They were superstars overnight and are the same even today.
~ Kangana Ranaut
Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.
~ Julius Evola
Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died.
~ Henry David Thoreau
The false prophets belonged to the socially and religiously acceptable institution of "professional" prophets who responded to the needs of their time. They operated from within the limited perspectives of their contemporaries: Realpolitik and vox populi.
~ Willem A. Vangemeren
grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word 'mogul
~ William Dalrymple
Only a few of Newton's contemporaries read the Principia with comprehension, and following generations chose to translate it into a more transparent, if less elegant, combination of algebra and the Newton-Leibniz calculus.
~ William H. Cropper
Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570–495 BC), the Buddha (563–483 BC), and Confucius (551–479 BC) were all contemporaries, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently unaware of the others' existence.
~ David Graeber
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
~ Gwendolyn Brooks
It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.
~ Stefan Zweig
There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them.
~ Albert Einstein
It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.
~ Edward Gibbon
Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville